This thesis focuses on how translation and subtitling deals with linguistic culture in six Taiwanese films with Spanish subtitles. Our objectives are: 1) to provide a dynamic concept to linguistic culture that allows us to include linguistic and paralinguistic aspects in order to identify the characteristics of the characters in the films, 2) to analyze the relationship between the most used translation techniques for the categories of our classification of cultural references and its reception in terms of context accessibility, and 3) to create a survey that will help us to find out how the film elements (subtitles, images, audio tracks) may condition the reception of the Spanish audience.
The methodology of this research consists in extracting the cultural references from the corpus according to our classification of cultural references, designing an analytical model for the reception of cultural references which includes the translation product (subtitles, images, audio tracks), the translation process (translation techniques and strategies) and the reception of cultural references (cognitive environment of Taiwanese and Spanish recipients), and creating a survey which enables us to analyze the reception of Rebels of the Neon God.
First, according to the results of this research, we conclude that even though the Spanish translation of cultural references which are extracted from the category of linguistic culture should be considered equivalent from the linguistic point of view, the conceptual equivalence may differ in their pragmatic dimension. Second, the analysis of the relationship between the most used translation techniques in the categories of our classification of cultural references shows that the accessibility to the contexts of the cultural references is a key factor when it comes to analyzing if the reception of the audience is similar between the source language and target language cultures. Also, the data of our survey shows that the images associated to the cultural references do not help the Spanish respondents in a significant way, because most of the cultural elements belong to the category of linguistic culture, which translators tend to neutralize or implicitate. Furthermore, it is difficult for the Spanish audience to interpret the fragments of the film without dialogues due to the cultural distance. As for the soundtrack, the paralinguistic element 'accent' cannot be identified by the Spanish audience, since this cultural element requires a certain linguistic and cultural knowledge if it is needed to identify the characters of this film.